Is That the Time?
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Overviews of lasting impressions from 2024 at the movies came in all forms over the holidays. IndieWire has gathered comments from sixty-five directors including Radu Jude, Payal Kapadia, and Luca Guadagnino—simple lists or a few words on just one or two favorites—and at Filmmaker, an almost entirely different set of directors have sent in what amounts to a collection that’s just as eclectic.
Slate’s Dana Stevens was joined in the Movie Club by K. Austin Collins, Bilge Ebiri, Odie Henderson, and Alison Willmore for a discussion not only of favorites but also of the current state of moviemaking and moviegoing. Contributors to the Notebook have each paired one new film with an older one, and the result is a cascade of creatively programmed double features. And Metrograph’s string of images and thoughts from Journal contributors makes for a delightful long scroll as well.
Over clips, Adam Nayman talks us through his list for the Ringer, and he discusses that list and much more with Beatrice Loayza and The Last Thing I Saw host Nicolas Rapold. Guy Lodge has posted an outstanding thread, counting down his top fifty-one films of 2024 with notes and links to favorite reviews. Further lists to recommend come from Mike D’Angelo and, at n+1, A. S. Hamrah.
Phil Concannon’s thoughts on his repertory discoveries are sure to add a few titles to your watch list. And for the BFI, Pamela Hutchinson writes about ten great films turning one hundred this year, including Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, Ernst Lubitsch’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Master of the House, and Henry King’s Stella Dallas.
Here are a few items that caught our eye over the past couple of weeks:
- Surveying the career of Claude Sautet for the Baffler, Sean Nam begins with applause for Jean-Pierre Melville’s championing of Sautet’s first feature, Classe tous risques (1960), when François Truffaut was declaring that “Sautet has no class, and he takes no risks, period.” Sautet made one more noirish feature, The Dictator’s Guns (1965), and if his “reputation in the 1960s was as a gallicized Don Siegel,” writes Nam, “he would make a drastic about-face in 1970 with his third feature, Les choses de la vie, a drama that takes place not in the community of brutes and toughs but in the professional-managerial classes of a glum architect, reeling from a midlife crisis . . . Such absorption in the quotidian affairs of the beautiful and the damned would make Sautet the de facto chronicler of the French bourgeoisie (haute and petite) of the 1970s, France’s own Age of Anxiety.”
- “Few works of art have captured the cesspool that is our social media public square as forcefully as this year’s Red Rooms, by Quebecois filmmaker Pascal Plante,” wrote Robert Rubsam for Liberties in the waning days of December. Red Rooms has landed on several 2024 top tens, including D’Angelo’s and Hamrah’s, mentioned above, and it tops Nayman’s. With Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse (2001) and Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) as touchstones, Rubsam writes about the evolution of cinema’s depiction of lives lived online. While Kurosawa “observes his subject from the outside in,” Red Rooms draws its protagonist into “a community of other dark-web dwellers,” a “counter-society of techie Raskolnikovs operating on monitors, in boring apartment buildings, visible only to those with the technological know-how, and the willingness to tolerate (or even cultivate) a keen sense of depravity.”
- After Gena Rowlands passed away last August, we saw several appreciations of her performance in John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence (1974)—and of course, of the film itself too. Matthew Jacobs has taken a somewhat different approach in his for Vulture. He talks with crew members who leapt to perform whatever task was needed at any given moment, regardless of their job titles. Mitchell Briet, for example, was a “painter turned best boy turned ‘in charge of lighting’ (as his credit reads).” Script supervisor Elaine Kagan and costume designer Carole Smith cooked up vats of spaghetti for a crucial scene. “We had so much fun, and it was so hard, and we were there all the time, and we didn’t have the money,” says Kagan. “Carole Smith and I were constantly calling to get short ends to shoot the next day. The intensity was exciting, besides being exhausting.”
- Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010) is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through February 17. Writing for the New York Review of Books in 2011, Zadie Smith tried “to get it clear in my own mind” just what Marclay had accomplished with this work. “The Clock is a twenty-four-hour movie that tells the time,” she wrote. “This is achieved by editing together clips of movies in which clocks appear. But The Clock is so monumental in intention and design that even the simplest things you can say about it need qualification.” Those qualifications can race off in any number of directions, and for MoMA’s Magazine, art historian Jonathan Crary reaches back to the past, to Lewis Mumford and Sergei Eisenstein. For Smith, though, the first time you see it, “you realize that The Clock is neither bad nor good, but sublime, maybe the greatest film you have ever seen, and you will need to come back in the morning, in the evening, and late at night, abandoning everything else, packing a sleeping bag . . . Except: Christ, is that the time? Oh well. Come back tomorrow.”
- There was plenty of talk over the holidays about Will Tavlin’s piece in the current n+1 on how Netflix, “which first emerged as a destroyer of video stores, has developed a powerful business model to conquer television, only to unleash its strange and destructive power on the cinema.” A reader might come away wondering how cinema could possibly survive, perhaps forgetting for the moment that, throughout its history, each and every time it’s declared dying or already dead, cinema reemerges from its peripheries. Tavlin is writing about a particular stratum of production and distribution, but glancing ahead—as we will soon!—to the dozens and dozens of films we can look forward to this year we can be reassured that cinema is an art capable of multifarious reinventions. In the meantime, as Tom Shone reminds us in the Guardian, cinephilia is alive, well, and thriving.
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